Preach brother
The Book of Eli / It’s the end of the world as we know it. Of course, hot on the heels of The Road and 2012, there’s not much we don’t know about Armageddon, so it’s all about the story of the survivors and a savior. This time it’s in the form of Denzel Washington, a solitary figure wandering the bleak landscape 30 years after an apocalyptic event known as the “flash.”
As Eli, Washington has packed a few amenities for his journey, including wetnaps from an international chicken chain that are a high form of currency, a few weapons that he’s very skilled with and a Bible–supposedly the last one in existence. Some may say disclosing the book is a spoiler, but The Book of Eli makes no attempt to keep this fact hidden from anybody who’s ever seen a copy. If it were a cookbook, that would be a twist. In any case, Eli has been trotting west for 30 years, knocking on nary a door. He’s not even sure what he’s supposed to be doing, relying on faith (geddit?) to deliver him and his book to where they’re needed.
But there’s another bibliophile on the horizon in the form of Gary Oldman’s Carnegie, who wants to cite scripture for his own purpose. Saying, “It’s not a book, it’s a weapon,” Carnegie wants to use the book’s power to increase his own–though being one of the few literate people left, it’s curious as to why he didn’t write his own tomes like some other religious figures who shall remain nameless. Needless to say, Eli refuses to hand over the good book, and the war of the words begins.
There are a lot of non-sequiturs in The Book of Eli that don’t quite measure up. We’re expected to believe that the masses are now illiterate, yet they’ve apparently retained knowledge of how to make liquor and recharge iPods. Like Eli states, “It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s faith.” In order to make this movie work (and for the most part, it does), the audience needs an abundance of it, but faith can only take you so far.
The last film that Allen and Albert Hughes directed together was From Hell, an adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic novel. Nine years later, they haven’t been able to shake the stylized violence commonto comic books. The first fight scene, whereupon Eli walks willingly into an ambush, is shot with such panache that it’s surprising it didn’t come from a Frank Miller graphic novel. Unfortunately, the rest of the film falls into a cartoon, with a bad guy who’s not fully fleshed out and marauding bands who have had too much flesh (yes, Virginia, like the last end-of-the-world movie, this road leads to cannibalism as well). Add to these clichés a town that fits better in Sergio Leone’s world than in a post-apocalyptic 2040, and a last-stand shotgun shack that’s been used by everyone from vampires in Near Dark to serial killers in The Devil’s Rejects, and you see how The Book of Eli has no new story to tell.
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